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gzero 02-08-2008 05:28 PM
Added Fedora 6 to Windows XP - Single hard drive
 
I have an old XP box that I was wanting to dual boot Fedora onto to get my feet wet with Linux systems. I wiped out my 30g HD and made two partitions, one half for Windows XP and the other for Fedora. I installed XP all was great. I then installed Fedora on second partion(I think) and Fedora install went good. When I start up Fedora 6 boots up. I figured it was suppose to ask which OS I wanted to boot from. Where should I start?

jailbait 02-08-2008 05:35 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by gzero (Post 3050864)
I have an old XP box that I was wanting to dual boot Fedora onto to get my feet wet with Linux systems. I wiped out my 30g HD and made two partitions, one half for Windows XP and the other for Fedora. I installed XP all was great. I then installed Fedora on second partion(I think) and Fedora install went good. When I start up Fedora 6 boots up. I figured it was suppose to ask which OS I wanted to boot from. Where should I start?
You edit the file: /boot/grub/menu.lst which is the grub boot loader configuration file.

Here is a tutorial on the grub boot loader:

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html

What you need is a title section in menu.lst for Fedora and one for XP.

Post your current menu.lst here and we will help you configure it.

-------------------
Steve Stites

gzero 02-09-2008 09:02 AM
How do I find menu.lst or grub for that matter. I'm as green as they get when it comes to linux os.


Also, my computer seems to show hda1, hda2, and hda3. I'm guessing these are partitions. One should have Windows, Linux and the last I think was 7mb of unused space. If I remember right.

Natilous 02-09-2008 12:31 PM
Hi,
you must fix or install grub boot loader.
boot the system with a liveCD-Linux (like Parsix,Knoppix,ubuntu,...) and run "grub" command in super user..follow this link.

good luck.

jailbait 02-09-2008 01:14 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by gzero (Post 3051467)
How do I find menu.lst or grub for that matter. I'm as green as they get when it comes to linux os.


Also, my computer seems to show hda1, hda2, and hda3. I'm guessing these are partitions. One should have Windows, Linux and the last I think was 7mb of unused space. If I remember right.
You are booting into Fedora correctly so you do not need to use a Live CD. Boot into Fedora and login as user. You can look at menu.lst as user but user cannot change menu.lst, so whenever you get to the point that you want to change menu.lst log in as root.

Start out by logging in as user. The file that you are looking for is /boot/grub/menu.lst. You can start the gui text editor called gedit and then open /boot/grub.menu.lst in gedit.

You can check what the partitions are by looking at /etc/fstab. Log in as user and use gedit to look at /etc/fstab.

----------------
Steve Stites

gzero 02-17-2008 04:38 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by jailbait (Post 3050868)
You edit the file: /boot/grub/menu.lst which is the grub boot loader configuration file.

Here is a tutorial on the grub boot loader:

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html

What you need is a title section in menu.lst for Fedora and one for XP.

Post your current menu.lst here and we will help you configure it.

-------------------
Steve Stites

Here is my menu.lst

Code:
# boot=/dev/hdb

default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora Core (2.618-1.2798.fc6)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6.img

title Ohter
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
This is as good as I could do it. I had to write all this down on a piece of paper and then type it in on a different computer. There was some commented code at the top before everything but I didn't include that. Is that something you might need? If so, let me know and I can post it as well.

gzero 02-17-2008 11:48 PM
fdisk -l
 
Here's what I have when I type "fdisk -l" in terminal...

Code:
Disk /dev/hdb: 30.0 GB, 30020272128 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 58168 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

    Device Boot          Start          End              Blocks            Id    System
/dev/hdb1  *                  1        29085          14658888+        c        W95 FAT32 (LBA)
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hdb2                29086        29294          184422+          83      Linux
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hdb3              29294          58156          14546857+        8e    Linux LVM
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
***There may be some typos. I had to type this out by hand because I'm not on that same computer.***

Could someone please help me set this configuration up correctly. I want to be able to start up the computer and have it ask me which OS to boot.

jailbait 02-18-2008 01:47 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by gzero (Post 3060651)

# boot=/dev/hdb

default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora Core (2.618-1.2798.fc6)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6.img

title Ohter
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
Get rid of hiddenmenu. hiddenmenu tells grub to not display the menu of OS choices. I don't know whether splashimage and quiet will interfere or not.

---------------------
Steve Stites

gzero 02-18-2008 05:18 PM
I took out the hiddenmenu and everything seemed to work great! It takes awhile to bootup to the selection menu but all was good.

I was also told to change timeout from 5 to 30. Is this a good idea? Is this just the amount of time it waits before it boots the default OS?

Thanks for all the help so far :D


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